02 NOV 2012 by ideonexus
Disneyland's Simulation Reinforces the Myth of the Real
Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted by the miniature and the comic strip. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But...It's fantasy persuades us to ignore the simulation of what we consider the "real" world. It presents itself as childish whimsy, which convinces us that what we experience daily is the "adult" world.
02 NOV 2012 by ideonexus
Ethnology Destroys What it Studies
Ethnology brushed up against its paradoxical death in 1971, the day when the Philippine government decided to return the few dozen Tasaday who had just been discovered in the depths of the jungle, where they had lived for eight centuries without any contact with the rest of the species, to their primitive state, out of the reach of colonizers, tourists, and ethnologists. This at the suggestion of the anthropologists themselves, who were seeing the indigenous people disintegrate immediately up...When the anthropologist interacts with the indigenous person, they change and corrupt them.